Lauryn Hill posts open letter on racism

After failing to file tax returns in 2005, 2006, and 2007, Lauryn Hill was sentenced to three months in prison this May. To avoid jail, she signed a million dollar recording contract with Sony as well as taking out a loan with the bank yet, last month, was jailed for failure to pay taxes; her last resort attempt to make some money having failed.

After failing to file tax returns in 2005, 2006, and 2007, Lauryn Hill was sentenced to three months in prison this May. To avoid jail, she signed a million dollar recording contract with Sony as well as taking out a loan with the bank yet, last month, was jailed for failure to pay taxes; her last resort attempt to make some money having failed.

She had taken to Tumblr in a scathing open letter back in April, before the sentence was passed, to attack the "traps, manipulations, and inequitable business arrangements" that led her into debt. HipHopDX are reporting that Hill has taken once again to Tumblr to write an even more extensive and biting open letter, this time focusing on the racial and judicial injustices within the United States.

She equates her tax woes to the deep seeded racial injustices in America:

Much of the world is still reeling from the abuses of Imperialist selfishness, misunderstanding, ignorance and greed. Black people remain in many ways a shattered community, disenfranchised, forcefully removed from context and still caged in, denied from making truly independent choices and experiencing existential freedom. Their natural homes, just like their natural selves, raped and pillaged of the resources and gifts God has given to them. Interpreted through someone else's slanted lens and filter, they remain in many ways, misrepresented. Taxation without proper representation, might I remind you, was the very platform of protest that began the Revolutionary War, which gained this country its independence from England. Anger is not only the natural response to the abuse of power, but is also appropriate when there is no real acknowledgment of these abuses, or deep, meaningful and profound change.

Focusing on the IRS problems in particular, the ex-Fugees member had this to say:

I shuddered during sentencing when I kept hearing the term 'make the IRS whole'… make the IRS whole, knowing that I got into these very circumstances having to deal with the very energies of inequity and resistance that created and perpetuated these savage inequalities. The entire time, I thought, who has made black people whole?! Who has made recompense for stealing, imposing, lying, murdering, criminalizing the traumatized, taking them against their wills, destroying their homes, dividing their communities, 'trying' to steal their destinies, their time, stagnating their development, I could go on and on. Has America, or any of the nations of the world guilty of these atrocities, ever made black people or Africa whole or do they continue to sit on them, control them, manipulate them, cage them, rob them, brutalize them, subject them to rules that don't apply to all? Use language, veiled coercion, and psychological torment like invisible fences to keep them locked into a pattern of limitation and therefore control by others. You have to remain focused to cease from rage.

Finally, she discusses how she feels about the America judicial system as a whole, and its wont to rehabilitate only after the problem has manifested, not before or during:

Why would a system, 'well intentioned', wait until breakdown or incarceration to consider rehabilitation, after generations of institutionally inflicted trauma and abuse on a people? To me it is obvious that the accumulation of generational trauma and abuse have created the very behaviors the system tries to punish, by providing no sufficient outlets for the victims of institutional terror. Clearly, the institution seeks to hide its own criminal history at the expense and wholeness of the abused, who 'acting out' from years of abuse and mistreatment, reflect the very aggression that they were exposed to.